106 link between erotic and literary disap- pointment. But I didn't really believe it, maybe because I suspected you couldn't call an end to a love affair just like that. T.ATELY, the predicament of fiction-its L ongoing state of peril-has made its way into the writing itself: Where sensi- bility once reigned supreme, we now find sensibility plus marketing saW)!. Even se- rious authors understand that readers are no longer the captive creatures they once were, breatWess for the sexual and psy- chological gossip that fiction provided. These days, we have to be lured away from the Starr report, and there is always a Starr report in one form or another. The much discussed memoir explosion is a response to this barrage of stranger- than-fiction information, of course, but so is a novel like John Burnham Schwartz's "Reservation Road" (Knopf; $24). I trust I will be understood as giving the book its due if I say that underneath its fine- pored prose beats a heart of pure pulp. Schwartz's sweetly modest first novel, "Bicycle Days," a coming-of-age tale set in Tokyo, carried a sense that a young man with some writing skill had gone out and written what he knew. It did not prepare me for anything about "Reser- vation Road," from its churning engine of plot to its audacious inhabiting of three different characters' minds. It feels as if Schwartz had been given a make- over-as though he'd gone offstage be- tween one novel and the next, only to return as a more polished, and less nat- ural, version of himself: The novel revolves around a hit-and- run accident in which Josh Learner, a ten-year-old boy, is killed. (Popular fic- tion has long relied on catastrophic de- vices for momentum, but their use in os- tensibly literary novels is a relatively recent wrinkle.) The consequences of the incident are narrated from the first- person viewpoints of the parents of the child, Ethan and Grace, and of DWIght Arno, the driver of the car. Ethan Lear- ner, a professor of literature at a small New England college, is lost in the kind of sorrow whose main manifestation is rage: "I hope it happens to you," he shouts at the officer on the case, who has faùed to find the perpetrator. Grace, who worked as a landscape gardener before the accident, spends much of the book in bed. She cries constandy, as does ev- eryone else, including Emma, the Lear- ners' eight-year-old daughter; Schwartz's world is a literal vale of tears. The per- son who appears to be least troubled by Josh's death is the man who caused it. Dwight, whose ten-year-old son, Sam, was with him on the July night when he struck Josh on a curving Connecticut road, has been ducking misfortune for so long that he's on automatic denial. "Whether you're innocent or guilty d ' " h " I ' h d oesn t matter, e says. t s t e soun of your name in a place where you ex- pected no one to know it that's enough to tip you over the edge." In the after- math of an ugly divorce, including a vio- lent scene with his wife in which he ac- cidentally broke Sam's jaw, he feels on probation in his own life, and reacts to Josh's death defensively rather than com- passionately. "Reservation Road" is what used to be called a page-turner: you keep read- ing to find out what will happen next. Will Grace pull herself together? Will Dwight give himself up? Will Ethan come to terms with the disaster? Will justice be served-or, short of that, ven- geance? The novel is tighrly wound, like a set of rolled-up blueprints that the au- thor spreads out before us, page by page: everything seems to fit in somewhere in the grand narrative scheme, and no chance encounter goes to waste. I didn't necessarily believe that these people would act as they do, but I'm not sure that matters much, for in betvveen their cunningly strategized entrances and exits there are sensitive descriptions to distract one: of the sky (' bove the trees the sky sat like an enormous bruise"); of Grace's garden ("Her garden dying like a coun- try gone to war"); of the scar on Sam's face ("You made for the left earlobe and dropped down an inch, followed the jawline with care and. . . there it was, pale as a thread of sun"). This tremulous prose is not to my taste, but I accept that it strikes many people as the real thing. I THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 5, 1998 am also willing to overlook the fact that the three main characters express the same level and texture of insight: Ethan sounds like Dwight, who sounds like Grace, and I frequently found myself checking back to see whose chapter I was reading. They're all awash in the same attenuated, tragic thoughts, with little accounting for differences in class, gender, or plain old experience. What does bother me, however, is the weight of Schwartz's intentions, which seem grand and inauthentic. If be had set out to write an entertainment (as Graham Greene used to call his lighter novels), "Reservation Road" would feel a bit cal- culated but satisfactory. As it is, I think the author means to comment sagely on the human condition. His novel is filled with suffering, but very little of it ap- pears to be arrived at by means other than artifice. It's odd to think of dark- ness being added as a commercial touch, but it's less odd when you think of the audience the book is meant for. It reads as though someone had put together a composite of the ideal upper-middle- class reader of fiction-half impatient to get back to "60 Minutes" and half guilty about not having got to that new novel everyone keeps mentioning. It's the per- fect quick fix for the overscheduled but well-intentioned: profundity without sweat. T HE pleasures of reading Helen Schulman's spryly inventive novel "The Revisionist" (Crown; $23) are very real but, as far as salability is concerned, less obvious. The book is about David HersWeder, a thirty-nine-year-old neu- rologist who takes on his own demons only after confronting the spectre of Holocaust revisionism, and it exists (or seems to exist, which is all one can ask for) without anxiety about readership, commercial imperatives, or the vagaries of the current moment. It is propelled by considerations of historical identity- particularly Jewish self-loathing-but also by the simpler impulse to articulate those things which people who don't write novels often notice and file away without finding the words for. There is the way, for instance, that adults read to young children: "Then he read to her out of some rhymey book, truly amazed at the schoolteacher lilt that slid into his voice. He even rested the book on his extended forearm, turning the pages